How is your asset or workplace performing from an experience perspective?

By Adam Keast16 Oct 2019

In today’s business landscape delivering memorable experiences across your workplace or office asset (and standing out from your competitors) has never been more important. People, clients, employees, customers; they all essentially want the same thing they’ve always wanted when it comes to interactions in a corporate setting - a seamless, professional and efficient experience. However, the way people compare brands and experiences has changed.

“You are now competing against the best experience your customers have ever had” - this quote, which stands tall in Google’s head office in California, has become increasingly well-known and it couldn’t be more accurate. Today, people no longer compare experiences within industries or silos, but instead across all aspects of their day to day lives. People expect to receive the same level of service throughout all aspects, and all interactions in their day; whether it’s ordering their morning coffee, shopping for a new piece of clothing, picking up their dry cleaning, getting from a to b, entering the workplace or visiting a client’s building.

Your brand is often defined by customer experience, and therefore it should be the single most important investment a company can make in today’s competitive business climate. Every interaction with a person, place or brand has the opportunity to leave a lasting impression and is often the first thing you recall, particularly when it stands out for the right or wrong reasons. Considering the customer experience within your commercial office asset or workplace should be thought of no differently. The experience felt by your employees, clients and/or tenants as they interact with your organisation and brand should be a major priority.
Below are a few tips to take into consideration within your customer service delivery model.

First impressions count

Let’s face it, first impressions absolutely count. More often than not, a first impression will set the scene for how a client perceives (and remembers) your brand and organisation.

The reception, concierge and/or welcome team is often the first interaction with your clients, employees, visitors or tenants. Therefore, at a high level, the following needs to be taken into consideration particularly for the reception, concierge and welcome team:

Grooming and presentation

Clutter free desks

The welcome experience such as eye contact, body language and peripheral awareness

The art of anticipation

Personalisation such as using guests' names and remembering their preferences

Communication - both verbal and nonverbal

Telephone etiquette

Strategies to improve your level of service

So, how do you achieve service excellence and ensure the best possible customer experience in your workplace or commercial office building? The overall objective for service excellence is to deliver a consistent and highly professional experience for all visitors, clients and prospective clients. Once you know the current level of service being provided you’ll be in a good position to improve it, some strategies to consider are listed below.

Review your current level of service: Before we establish ways to further improve our clients service delivery we first review their current level of service. Ideally, you want to know where you are successful in your level of service and continually seek to identify the opportunities for improvement.
The simplest way to do this is through a Service Audit which we often undertake via a ‘mystery shopping’ exercise, this enables us to gauge firsthand the level of service being provided. Many variables impact customer experience within a workplace and/or commercial office building, so it’s important to look at the whole experience. Therefore, in our mystery shopping exercises we look at everything from arriving and being greeted, through to ease of finding directions, the cleanliness of a building or workplace, how you’re treated when waiting for a meeting (e.g. offered a coffee) and so on.

Learn from your team: your front-line teams communicate with your customers daily and can provide powerful insights into the best and worst parts of your service delivery. They are the best opportunity for you to address pain points before they escalate.

Training programs: implementing a tailored service excellence training for visitor and client facing people provides an opportunity to implement new service strategies, identify areas for improvement, celebrate excellence, clearly define the service offering and essentially, build on the quality of service the team members currently deliver. Where possible, these training programs should be made face to face (rather than online) for maximum engagement.

Overall, training programs provide an excellent opportunity to coach the team to raise the bar when it comes to customer experience.

Nationalising the service level: this is an important one for organisations with multiple client facing offices or asset owners with the same tenant across multiple assets. Ideally, you want your visitors, tenants or employees to receive the same level of service across all your offices or buildings. This creates a level of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of “returning home.”

Implement customer experience values: within our team we created and implemented the MADE concept for our concierge people. This is enforced within everything we do and follows the principle of Memorable Authentic Differentiated Experiences as we are constantly encouraging our people to be memorable, be authentic and be different. So, think about what your value concept could be. Providing your reception or concierge people with core customer service and experience values ensures reinforcement on how the experience should be delivered everyday.

Owning your environment: in today’s world we are all very busy, and front-line teams can often become transactional due to the repetitious nature of duties. It’s important to ensure all team members focus on creating interactions rather than transactions.

So, when reviewing and revising your business strategy, particularly when it comes to your workplace or office asset, ensure the users experience is front of mind. The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail and has the power to influence whether a person or business will continue interacting with you.

My team and I specialise in service delivery and, specifically, how to deliver the best possible customer experience for your employees, clients and tenants and more importantly how to maintain that level of standard long term. If you are interested in improving the customer experience within your building asset or your workplace feel free to get in touch via the following details:

Adam Keast
Email: adam.keast@colliers.com
Phone: +61 499 797 452

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Adam Keast

Adam is the Director of Operations for Workplace Management Services (WMS), a unique offering for corporate occupiers who require high performance workplaces to increase productivity and guest experience.

With a diverse and global career as a hospitality professional, Adam spent over 15 years working as a Chief Concierge in some of Australia’s leading hotels before expanding his knowledge and skills by moving to Dubai as the pre-opening Chief Concierge at the InterContinental Hotels Group development in Dubai Festival City, comprising over 900 rooms across 3 hotels. During Adam's career he was awarded membership into the exclusive Les Clefs d’Or (otherwise known as the ‘Golden Keys’), a professional concierge network comprising 3,500 members globally.

Upon returning to Australia in 2009, he was appointed as the General Manager of Concierge Services at First Contact. During this time at First Contact Adam was instrumental in establishing a market leading hospitality solution, never seen before in the commercial property industry.